Here's why Citizendium is far better:
* It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails.
* It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last. Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
*This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the nutters and fans that Wikipedia has.
*The place is in the hands of "writers" and not an army of "1600 administrators". Can you imagine writing for Wikipedia as an expert and knowing that your bosses are in high school, maybe university, and only occasionally over 35 years old?
*Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists. It's more about the material.
*All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes & etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who show up at Citizendium.
*Citizendium's difficult entrance exam is not really all that difficult. It's a sure-fire way of keeping out those who are not prepared to edit an encyclopedia and frankly, I love that!
Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important subjects.
Chet
2009/4/21 Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com:
*This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the nutters and fans that Wikipedia has.
I suspect this is only because it's in its early days. Keep in mind: when Clay Shirky wrote "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", he used Wikipedia as an example of somewhere that had *avoided* these problems.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
As of 2009, Wikipedia looks like it's hit its head on every step on the way down.
Larry's clearly read this essay. But remember: a group being its own worst enemy is something every group complacently sleepwalks into.
*Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists. It's more about the material.
It's not clear those have anything to do with each other. Instruction creep is a problem in all organisations. See above re: complacency.
*All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes & etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who show up at Citizendium.
Thus resulting in spectacular successes like the Homeopathy article. *cough*
Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important subjects.
Citizendium sticking around would be much better than it not, and most of the people involved are less bitter than Larry.
- d.
2009/4/21 Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com:
Here's why Citizendium is far better:
- It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails.
The identities aren't generally verified, the only requirement is that you use a name which is plausibly a real one. It doesn't have to be your real name.
- It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last. Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
Um... http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Pokemon
*This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the nutters and fans that Wikipedia has.
It's an incentive to writers, maybe, but not to readers. Nobody reads Citizendium articles because there aren't enough of them to be worth the trip. The articles may, in some cases, be better than the corresponding Wikipedia articles, but Wikipedia is good enough and you know before you start that the article will exist. With Citizendium, chances are it doesn't. That's not really Citizendium's fault, any competitor to Wikipedia is going to face the same problem - Wikipedia got there first.
*The place is in the hands of "writers" and not an army of "1600 administrators". Can you imagine writing for Wikipedia as an expert and knowing that your bosses are in high school, maybe university, and only occasionally over 35 years old?
That statement just shows a misunderstanding about what Wikipedia admins do - the are janitors, not bosses.
*Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists. It's more about the material.
The premise is false (see first response) and the conclusion doesn't even follow from it.
*All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes & etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who show up at Citizendium.
That may be true, but Wikipedia is so much bigger than Citizendium that we still have far more good writers, even if the proportion of good writers is less.
*Citizendium's difficult entrance exam is not really all that difficult. It's a sure-fire way of keeping out those who are not prepared to edit an encyclopedia and frankly, I love that!
Wikipedia finds users that just want to make a couple of minor copyedits useful, if Citizendium feels they aren't worth the trouble, that's just a matter of opinion. I can certainly see Citizendium's point of view, but I don't agree with it.
Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important subjects.
So it's all about the writing? I would have though the important thing was the reading. Wikipedia is all about spreading free knowledge - if no-one reads what you write, there is no point writing it. If you don't reach a comparable size to Wikipedia (you don't have to be bigger, just within an order of magnitude or so) you won't attract many readers. Without readers, you won't attract more writers (pretty much all Wikipedians started out as readers, if Citizendium wants to attract a significant number of writers it needs to use the same source). Without more writers, the current writers will eventually get bored and move on and the project will cease to exist.
I think competition is fantastic and fully encourage people to start competitors to Wikipedia, but in my view Citizendium has failed. It wasn't sufficiently better than Wikipedia to attract enough writers and readers to kick off exponential growth, which is required to reach a useful size.
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
So it's all about the writing? I would have though the important thing was the reading. Wikipedia is all about spreading free knowledge - if no-one reads what you write, there is no point writing it. If you don't reach a comparable size to Wikipedia (you don't have to be bigger, just within an order of magnitude or so) you won't attract many readers. Without readers, you won't attract more writers (pretty much all Wikipedians started out as readers, if Citizendium wants to attract a significant number of writers it needs to use the same source). Without more writers, the current writers will eventually get bored and move on and the project will cease to exist.
Yes. This is a fallacy we see over and over: "Wikipedia would be so much better if you did X for the writers." Whereas that doesn't serve the readers, so is why we don't do it. So other projects come along that will do X for the writers, and fail to gain traction. Knol is the highest-profile failure so far - untrammeled freedom for the writers has made it a spam repository.
I think competition is fantastic and fully encourage people to start competitors to Wikipedia, but in my view Citizendium has failed. It wasn't sufficiently better than Wikipedia to attract enough writers and readers to kick off exponential growth, which is required to reach a useful size.
Citizendium's not dead yet!
But it'll get good in direct proportion to how much it forms its own positive identity, rather than one based on comparing itself to Wikipedia.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Yes. This is a fallacy we see over and over: "Wikipedia would be so much better if you did X for the writers." Whereas that doesn't serve the readers, so is why we don't do it. So other projects come along that will do X for the writers, and fail to gain traction. Knol is the highest-profile failure so far - untrammeled freedom for the writers has made it a spam repository.
- d.
Ultimately, I think this is true. Almost....
Wikipedia has cornered the market in "huge coverage, but somewhat questionable reliability" online encyclopedias. Whilst it is true that Wikipedia could be improved on and a Wikipedia+ system devised, it will fail. Just as surely as any new operating system will fail if it tries to sell itself as "Windows but a bit better". The saturation of the established product will squash it. This is also why content forking is quite useless. The only hope for An Other is to offer an entirely different formula from "huge coverage, but somewhat questionable reliability". (If you up the reliability by selecting your writers, then your coverage will be proportionately decreased anyway.)
You would need to be able to offer a product which was *substantially* more reliable, but still wide and participatory enough not just to be another Veropedia. If you could do that, comparisons with wikipedia would be pointless - the point would be that people looking for reliable, citable, material on any core subject would use that encyclopedia in preference to/or alongside Wikipedia. That Wikipedia had 100 times more articles would be beside the point.
(It is interesting to consider what would happen if Encarta had been made available and maintained free to use by Microsoft - perhaps ad funded - it might well have taken the business from Wikipedia on many core topics.)
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question". Readers will not be interested until you have enough writers to produce the goods, and do so in a reliable way. So you really need to find a motivation to make qualified people want to contribute (or Wikipedia's best to switch). Ultimately, having a lot of readers will do that, but any start up needs initially to offer something else to the writer.
There are two things which motivate people - fame and money. Wikipedia offers neither. It is not impossible that a formula could emerge that allows revenue to the writer or the writer to get the type of kudos that is bankable on a CV. Knowl and CZ have both realised this - but neither seems to have got the formula right. (If, indeed, it is possible to.)
The Other does not need to think in terms of replacing Wikipedia - or scoring more Goggle juice. Success is where someone looking for a source they can quote in their school essay says "better try Otherpedia.com".
Indeed would it not be great if in ten years time I can google a subject, easily find the wikipedia article, and then, if the subject is not so obscure that only Wikipedia will cover it, follow the link to the academically respectable Otherpedia.com article (which, indeed, is reliable enough to have been allowed as a source for Wikipedia)!
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question".
I don't think the two questions can be separated. Without the feedback between the two (readers becoming writers) you'll never get exponential growth and without that you'll never reach a size where you are useful.
I completely agree with you than new Wikipedia-like projects need to be substantially different to Wikipedia if they are going to get anywhere. However, achieving significant growth will still be a requirement for any such project. You mention a project 1/100 the size of Wikipedia. Citizendium is currently 1/250 the size of the English Wikipedia and at its current growth rate it won't reach 1/100 the size for another 3 years or so - I don't think the project will last that long unless there are major changes. People will just get bored and leave. At its current size, even if Citizendium was significantly more reliable than Wikipedia, it still wouldn't be useful.
As for your "otherpedia" - I would like to think we can achieve something like that within Wikipedia. An enhanced version of Featured Articles, making use of FlaggedRevs and verified experts, could achieve the same goals are your "otherpedia".
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question".
I don't think the two questions can be separated. Without the feedback between the two (readers becoming writers) you'll never get exponential growth and without that you'll never reach a size where you are useful.
What is the minimum size a project must be in order to be "useful"?
2009/4/22 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question".
I don't think the two questions can be separated. Without the feedback between the two (readers becoming writers) you'll never get exponential growth and without that you'll never reach a size where you are useful.
What is the minimum size a project must be in order to be "useful"?
I don't know. It depends on the intended breadth of the project, for a start. A general encyclopaedia needs to be bigger than a specialist one. A Wikipedia-like project becomes useful when you can be reasonably confident that it will have the information you seek (if that information is within its intended bounds). If you can't be reasonably confident of that then you would probably go somewhere else for the information. People may find useful information on a smaller project via search engines, but few people will go directly to the project as their first port of call, as people often do with Wikipedia (although a very large proportion of our readers still come from search engines).
Perhaps "useful" is too strong a term, "useful enough to rival Wikipedia" would be better. Doc said, 'Success is where someone looking for a source they can quote in their school essay says "better try Otherpedia.com".' That will never happen until that someone can be reasonable confident that they will find what they need on Otherpedia.com.
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I don't know. It depends on the intended breadth of the project, for a start. A general encyclopaedia needs to be bigger than a specialist one.
I like that Wikipedia has led to a proliferation of specialist wiki-based encyclopedias. In most cases the key difference is allowing original research.
- d.
Maaaayybe NPOV could work with specialist wiki-based encyclopedias. But with Wikipedia, NPOV is only good so long as an article is popular or not controversial.
With Citizendium, it remains to be seen.
________________________________ From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:24:26 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I don't know. It depends on the intended breadth of the project, for a start. A general encyclopaedia needs to be bigger than a specialist one.
I like that Wikipedia has led to a proliferation of specialist wiki-based encyclopedias. In most cases the key difference is allowing original research.
- d.
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On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Perhaps "useful" is too strong a term, "useful enough to rival Wikipedia" would be better.
I think so. If you set your standards of success in terms of Wikipedia, there's simply no competition. Wikipedia has achieved an unrivaled success in terms of the standards it has set to measure success.
2009/4/22 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Perhaps "useful" is too strong a term, "useful enough to rival Wikipedia" would be better.
I think so. If you set your standards of success in terms of Wikipedia, there's simply no competition. Wikipedia has achieved an unrivaled success in terms of the standards it has set to measure success.
Yep. If you set your standards of success in terms of Britannica, Wikipedia is not quite there yet. But the point is that this doesn't matter in practice - it turns out that Wikipedia is more useful because people use it in practice at their desks every day, rather than admiring the impressive shelf of books they remember from high school.
Britannica was already suffering from Encarta (which was invented as demoware for the existence of CD-ROM drives) and the Internet - Wikipedia was the Internet having the temerity to use the word "encyclopedia."
So whatever out-innovates Wikipedia from below will succeed in some way we haven't thought of yet. What Wikipedia rules are there we could try breaking?
* NPOV (I don't think so, lots have tried this) * Notability (possibly - our breadth is our key asset, and overapplied "notability" rules trash this) * NOR (maybe - note that not every Wikipedia has this rule) * Expert privilege (Citizendium is trying this, we'll see how it goes)
What others are there?
- d.
Competent writing, enforced by actual editors, volunteer or otherwise.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 4:41 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Perhaps "useful" is too strong a term, "useful enough to rival Wikipedia" would be better.
I think so. If you set your standards of success in terms of Wikipedia, there's simply no competition. Wikipedia has achieved an unrivaled success in terms of the standards it has set to measure success.
Yep. If you set your standards of success in terms of Britannica, Wikipedia is not quite there yet. But the point is that this doesn't matter in practice - it turns out that Wikipedia is more useful because people use it in practice at their desks every day, rather than admiring the impressive shelf of books they remember from high school.
Britannica was already suffering from Encarta (which was invented as demoware for the existence of CD-ROM drives) and the Internet - Wikipedia was the Internet having the temerity to use the word "encyclopedia."
So whatever out-innovates Wikipedia from below will succeed in some way we haven't thought of yet. What Wikipedia rules are there we could try breaking?
- NPOV (I don't think so, lots have tried this)
- Notability (possibly - our breadth is our key asset, and overapplied
"notability" rules trash this)
- NOR (maybe - note that not every Wikipedia has this rule)
- Expert privilege (Citizendium is trying this, we'll see how it goes)
What others are there?
- d.
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2009/4/23 David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com:
Competent writing, enforced by actual editors, volunteer or otherwise.
The evolved Wikipedia house style does seem to be where good writing goes to be mummified. At least it's easy for not so good writers to contribute usefully. Given the choice, I'd rather have all the useful detail rather than beautiful writing, but both would be nice thanks.
(You can see this in articles - you have a well-written article, someone adds something not well written that sticks out like a sore thumb but is clearly relevant, then it gets rewritten over time. Repeat until digested into grey mush.)
- d.
Very few people manage to acheive in their lives either fame in the world as a whole, or much money. What motivates people is the extent to which they can become a respected (or, if you will, famous) member of whatever their own circles are, at work and outside it. Both Wikipedia and Citizendium are large enough to offer this. To a certain extent its easier in a smaller community, but a large one offers more sub-groups. Large communities typically form as many subgroups as necessary to provide all the people after a period awaiting acceptance with an opportunity for this. Primates typically want to become alpha in their own band, not king of the jungle.
The next step in self-respect is knowing that one's community has a role of some significance in wider circles--that one's band will come out ahead in conflicts with other such bands. Typically, the actual alpha primate in a band doesn't have much direct function here--it depends on the younger ones. This at present is why people come to Wikipedia: whatever small role one has with it will be seen much more widely.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote: .
There are two things which motivate people - fame and money. Wikipedia offers neither. It is not impossible that a formula could emerge that allows revenue to the writer or the writer to get the type of kudos that is bankable on a CV. Knowl and CZ have both realised this - but neither seems to have got the formula right. (If, indeed, it is possible to.)
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Depends on the people.
Wikipedia is full of people who like participating in an online community, and respect within that community is then a motivation. However, Wikipedia is notoriously bad at attracting expects, and even the experts we have tend to run away from their specialist areas.
Imagine a project where someone wrote the article on Quantum Physics, The Beetles, or the Latin declensions, not primarily because they cared about kudos in the virtual community but because they were experts in their field, cared about it, and liked the writing an article and having their name associated with it. Imagine a project where a doctoral student who usually writes research papers was attracted to write an general article in their field and add it to their publications resume, knowing that other knowledgeable people in the field would offer feedback and assessment.
Wikipedia does well at attracting and retaining the type of people it has, doing their things they do - and that produces the product you get. A different model, based on a different motivational psychology, would yield different results.
I think the problem for the Wikipedia vs Citizendium debate is that it too much assumes that the Citizendium model succeeds only if it manages eventually to duplicate all that is good about Wikipedia, whilst improving on some of the downsides. Indeed, I think Sanger made this mistake from the outset - seen in his initial ambition to use the whole Wikipedia database. You can go for an authoritative, reliable, encyclopedia, written by experts, or you can go for size and wide scope. You can't square the circle. Complaining that the ordinary web user can't easily edit CZ, misses the point that you don't want them too. Elitist encyclopaedias are written by elites. (Although I think they've pretty much failed in attracting that elite group.)
If at any time Otherpedia.org succeeds, you will not be able to compare it with wikipedia. It will be apples to the WMF oranges. I, for myself, I don't think it it will be a wiki at all.
David Goodman wrote:
Very few people manage to acheive in their lives either fame in the world as a whole, or much money. What motivates people is the extent to which they can become a respected (or, if you will, famous) member of whatever their own circles are, at work and outside it. Both Wikipedia and Citizendium are large enough to offer this. To a certain extent its easier in a smaller community, but a large one offers more sub-groups. Large communities typically form as many subgroups as necessary to provide all the people after a period awaiting acceptance with an opportunity for this. Primates typically want to become alpha in their own band, not king of the jungle.
The next step in self-respect is knowing that one's community has a role of some significance in wider circles--that one's band will come out ahead in conflicts with other such bands. Typically, the actual alpha primate in a band doesn't have much direct function here--it depends on the younger ones. This at present is why people come to Wikipedia: whatever small role one has with it will be seen much more widely.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote: .
There are two things which motivate people - fame and money. Wikipedia offers neither. It is not impossible that a formula could emerge that allows revenue to the writer or the writer to get the type of kudos that is bankable on a CV. Knowl and CZ have both realised this - but neither seems to have got the formula right. (If, indeed, it is possible to.)
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
However, Wikipedia is notoriously bad at attracting expects, and even the experts we have tend to run away from their specialist areas.
I'd like something more than anecdotal evidence of this or repeated assertion. In my experience, you can hardly move on Wikipedia without bumping into a Ph.D.
- d.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question". Readers will not be interested until you have enough writers to produce the goods, and do so in a reliable way. So you really need to find a motivation to make qualified people want to contribute (or Wikipedia's best to switch). Ultimately, having a lot of readers will do that, but any start up needs initially to offer something else to the writer.
I think that's a nice theory, but a number of new projects have in some sense (either people-wise or concept-wise) spun out of Wikipedia to try and do that, and in practice have not had readership follow them or build up on their own.
There are a number of possible explanations... Wikipedia just has grabbed public mindshare and others don't have a wedge to get in right now. Wikipedia's readers to editors curve being so easy may in fact be a key innovation and enabler to get and keep reader mindshare. The other encyclopedias may just not get "reader friendly" well enough and thus be ultimately doomed walled gardens. Or perhaps we're being too harsh, time and content will bring critical masses of readership.
If any of these projects really don't value readership, then they're truly doomed.
George Herbert wrote:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question". Readers will not be interested until you have enough writers to produce the goods, and do so in a reliable way. So you really need to find a motivation to make qualified people want to contribute (or Wikipedia's best to switch). Ultimately, having a lot of readers will do that, but any start up needs initially to offer something else to the writer.
I think that's a nice theory, but a number of new projects have in some sense (either people-wise or concept-wise) spun out of Wikipedia to try and do that, and in practice have not had readership follow them or build up on their own.
There are a number of possible explanations... Wikipedia just has grabbed public mindshare and others don't have a wedge to get in right now. Wikipedia's readers to editors curve being so easy may in fact be a key innovation and enabler to get and keep reader mindshare. The other encyclopedias may just not get "reader friendly" well enough and thus be ultimately doomed walled gardens. Or perhaps we're being too harsh, time and content will bring critical masses of readership.
If any of these projects really don't value readership, then they're truly doomed.
As I've said, the other projects basically fail for being too like wikipedia. Why write for something which you might consider "a little better than wikipedia in area x" when you can write for Wikipedia, which is read far more.
You need to offer a writer something very different, if you are to motivate him to write in the early stages when readership will be low. Or indeed, you have to attract the type of writer who would be wholly disinterested in writing for wikipedia.
Readership WILL eventually be the incentive for writing. But any startup begins with zero readers, and can't possibly attract any readers unless it has content, for which is needs writers motivated to write only in the expectation of future readers.
Your first task is to find a model people want to write for.
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
Readership WILL eventually be the incentive for writing. But any startup begins with zero readers, and can't possibly attract any readers unless it has content, for which is needs writers motivated to write only in the expectation of future readers.
You could seed your new project with content from an existing one (as Citizendium tried at one point), that can get around the issue of having no readers to start with - you can start attracting readers at the same time as you attract writers. It becomes very difficult to be sufficiently different from Wikipedia if you start with identical content, though, and I agree that that is required for any real success.
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
You need to offer a writer something very different, if you are to motivate him to write in the early stages when readership will be low. Or indeed, you have to attract the type of writer who would be wholly disinterested in writing for wikipedia.
More - you need people who are actually disinterested, not embittered. Note how many Wikipedia Review regulars have managed to get banned from Citizendium as well as Wikipedia in record time. It's entirely unclear why they don't start their own wiki encyclopedia, and thus demonstrate our evil and worthlessness.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
You need to offer a writer something very different, if you are to motivate him to write in the early stages when readership will be low. Or indeed, you have to attract the type of writer who would be wholly disinterested in writing for wikipedia.
More - you need people who are actually disinterested, not embittered. Note how many Wikipedia Review regulars have managed to get banned from Citizendium as well as Wikipedia in record time. It's entirely unclear why they don't start their own wiki encyclopedia, and thus demonstrate our evil and worthlessness.
- d.
I suspect that most of such critics have reached the conclusion that a wiki is not a suitable way of creating an encyclopedia.
It does seem to me that most of this discussion is predicated on the assumption that Otherpedia.org will be a wiki and will be free-use. I strongly suspect that anything that starts from that basis will be too much like wikipedia to be anything more than a small-player in some niche.
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
I suspect that most of such critics have reached the conclusion that a wiki is not a suitable way of creating an encyclopedia. It does seem to me that most of this discussion is predicated on the assumption that Otherpedia.org will be a wiki and will be free-use. I strongly suspect that anything that starts from that basis will be too much like wikipedia to be anything more than a small-player in some niche.
Hmm. Wonder what a next model could look like.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
I suspect that most of such critics have reached the conclusion that a wiki is not a suitable way of creating an encyclopedia. It does seem to me that most of this discussion is predicated on the assumption that Otherpedia.org will be a wiki and will be free-use. I strongly suspect that anything that starts from that basis will be too much like wikipedia to be anything more than a small-player in some niche.
Hmm. Wonder what a next model could look like.
- d.
If I knew, I'd not tell you, and I'd be setting it right now.
If you know, do tell me, and I'll let you be the co-founder. ;)
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
I suspect that most of such critics have reached the conclusion that a wiki is not a suitable way of creating an encyclopedia. It does seem to me that most of this discussion is predicated on the assumption that Otherpedia.org will be a wiki and will be free-use. I strongly suspect that anything that starts from that basis will be too much like wikipedia to be anything more than a small-player in some niche.
David Gerard wrote:
Hmm. Wonder what a next model could look like.
- d.
on 4/22/09 5:19 PM, doc at doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
If I knew, I'd not tell you, and I'd be setting it right now.
There actually is something in the works right now, Doc. It's being supported by a foundation, a professional association and a university. It will be ready to go in about six months.
Marc Riddell
I don't think I can agree that a wiki is not suitable for a next class of encyclopedia project.
Wikipedia, with verified identification for "approved editors", with moderated updates still retaining "anyone can edit", and with author credit for the top [say five] contributors to any article, I think would go a long way to that next model.
You are approved as an editor merely by verifying your identification, not by credential. This is the way Knol does it, and I like that. It neatly cuts off, right at the head, any desire by editors to vandalize.
Anyone can edit, still allows any reader/writer to feel special and needed. They should be able to view the approved-article with their new changes right away, people won't like needing to wait a day to follow their own line-of-thought further.
Author credit tempts professional writers to stay and contribute, as opposed to drifting over to Knol. I wonder if Brittanica will adopt an author-credit model on moderated edits? That would be interesting.
Will Johnson
David Gerard wrote:
2009/4/22 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
You need to offer a writer something very different, if you are to motivate him to write in the early stages when readership will be low. Or indeed, you have to attract the type of writer who would be wholly disinterested in writing for wikipedia.
More - you need people who are actually disinterested, not embittered. Note how many Wikipedia Review regulars have managed to get banned from Citizendium as well as Wikipedia in record time. It's entirely unclear why they don't start their own wiki encyclopedia, and thus demonstrate our evil and worthlessness.
It's perfectly clear why they don't: They're waiting for someone else to pay for the bandwidth. Since they would start from the premise that their ideas would be very popular, they realize that this would be too expensive. ;-)
Ec
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:31 PM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Why write for something which you might consider "a little better than wikipedia in area x" when you can write for Wikipedia, which is read far more.
The main motivation would be if you're working in an area of Wikipedia where it's more than a minor hassle to get your improvements to stick. Of course, you'd need some sort of assurance that you wouldn't run into the exact same problems in that new forum. I believe Citizendium has proven itself to not be a place where the correct "side" always prevails (the homeopathy article has proven that), so CZ is out. Knol is perhaps an alternative, but 1) it doesn't definitively support GFDL (this may soon not matter); and 2) it's, for lack of better description, clunky.
You want something where people are encouraged to work together, but once they've tried and failed they can always fork. Combine that with Metapedia, and you might even have something. Will you let me be the co-founder?
2009/4/22 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'd say that "the reader question" is less pertinent for any start up than the "writer question". Readers will not be interested until you have enough writers to produce the goods, and do so in a reliable way. So you really need to find a motivation to make qualified people want to contribute (or Wikipedia's best to switch). Ultimately, having a lot of readers will do that, but any start up needs initially to offer something else to the writer.
I think that's a nice theory, but a number of new projects have in some sense (either people-wise or concept-wise) spun out of Wikipedia to try and do that, and in practice have not had readership follow them or build up on their own.
I think you'll see the reader-writer synergy more clearly on the small specialist encyclopedia wikis that have sprung up in great numbers. Mostly using MediaWiki, because it is after all fundamentally built to run reference wikis.
More people need to read MeatBallWiki. It's like Meta for the whole of wikidom.
- d.
George Herbert wrote:
Or perhaps we're being too harsh, time and content will bring critical masses of readership.
When would exponential growth of readership occur? In a phase when Web readership was growing exponentially (in the past now, it seems, and I do know what the term means); when the application is sufficiently new and different to distract people from what they were already doing online. "Critical mass" strikes me as a misplaced metaphor, really. Though it would do fine for social networking sites.
Charles
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Indeed would it not be great if in ten years time I can google a subject, easily find the wikipedia article, and then, if the subject is not so obscure that only Wikipedia will cover it, follow the link to the academically respectable Otherpedia.com article (which, indeed, is reliable enough to have been allowed as a source for Wikipedia)!
I think this is in fact a market opportunity for a Metapedia. Import the organizational / title trees of all the publically available freely licensed encyclopedias, merge, present readers with alternate views / options / approaches to a particular topic. Optionally, display in parallel, Wikipedia next to Citizendum next to Otherpedia. Click on a hyperlink in any and it works across all the panes. Click on a focus tab for a particular pane and get the wider navigation / editing / etc tabs for that particular encyclopedia.
We could even conceptually add a function to Wikipedia, to add cross-wiki links to other non-WP projects in the same manner as we do to foreign language Wikipedias now. Why should we not have a link to Citizendum or Otherpedia.com on the WP page? We don't lose anything doing that.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:28 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I think this is in fact a market opportunity for a Metapedia. Import the organizational / title trees of all the publically available freely licensed encyclopedias, merge, present readers with alternate views / options / approaches to a particular topic. Optionally, display in parallel, Wikipedia next to Citizendum next to Otherpedia. Click on a hyperlink in any and it works across all the panes. Click on a focus tab for a particular pane and get the wider navigation / editing / etc tabs for that particular encyclopedia.
This is a wonderful idea! It could even make sense to have Metapedia as a Wikimedia project...an explicitly curatorial project that attempts to sort different kinds of content and evaluate strengths and weaknesses. It could also serve as a place to have general discussions about certain topics, without the necessity (as on Wikipedia talk pages, nominally) of focusing on content improvement; that's something that there's a need for, and something that causes specific projects to suffer because of the tendency of readers to try to start general discussions.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)
2009/4/22 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
I think this is in fact a market opportunity for a Metapedia.
Careful, that's actually the name of a neo-Nazi fork of Wikipedia!
"Countering semantic distortion worldwide." Got it.
- d.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 1:19 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
I think this is in fact a market opportunity for a Metapedia.
Careful, that's actually the name of a neo-Nazi fork of Wikipedia!
"Countering semantic distortion worldwide." Got it.
Oh, great.
I should have looked before I used it as a name for the concept. Now my eyes hurt.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 4:19 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
I think this is in fact a market opportunity for a Metapedia.
Careful, that's actually the name of a neo-Nazi fork of Wikipedia!
"Countering semantic distortion worldwide." Got it.
I'll let you use p2pedia.org. :)
2009/4/23 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I'll let you use p2pedia.org. :)
Suggestion: Distributed git-based backed for MediaWiki.
Usefulness: encouraging forks *and merges*. Now *that* could kick Wikipedia's arse in useful and productive ways.
- d.
2009/4/23 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/4/23 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I'll let you use p2pedia.org. :)
Suggestion: Distributed git-based backed for MediaWiki.
Usefulness: encouraging forks *and merges*. Now *that* could kick Wikipedia's arse in useful and productive ways.
I recall this being discussed before somewhere (mediawiki-l?). It's an interesting idea, but I don't know enough about git to know if it could actually be made to work (it would need something better than our current edit conflict system, for a start).
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/23 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/4/23 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I'll let you use p2pedia.org. :)
Suggestion: Distributed git-based backed for MediaWiki.
Usefulness: encouraging forks *and merges*. Now *that* could kick Wikipedia's arse in useful and productive ways.
I recall this being discussed before somewhere (mediawiki-l?). It's an interesting idea, but I don't know enough about git to know if it could actually be made to work (it would need something better than our current edit conflict system, for a start).
You're right that it's been discussed before, but hits are hard to find. eg http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/2007-11-10_Dreaming_Of_Mediawiki_Using_GIT
Git would certainly do better than our current edit conflict system; resolving such conflicts is precisely the point of smart DVCS systems. (And it'd make it a lot easier to get dumps and work offline.)
The issue, of course, is performance. The English Wikipedia history according to http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/ is 147.7 gigabytes. Compressed. Now, Git is known for its speed and general efficiency, but even it can't cope with that. It might barely be possible for a single local installation to profitably use Git, but I can't see the actual servers, taking hundreds and thousands of edits a minute, working. Even alternative suggestions like 'make every article an individual git repo' are problematic. And of course any such conversion would be a *massive* programming challenge, to go from Mysql interfacing to Git.
As it happens, I've thought about this before and have a little expertise in the issue. I'm one of the developers of a wiki called Gitit - http://github.com/jgm/gitit/tree/master - written in Haskell. The most interesting thing about Gitit, besides its ability to export articles (written in Markdown or ReST) in various formats such as HTML or PDFs or LaTeX, is that it uses a library called 'filestore' - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/filestore - to access and change articles.
Filestore is an abstraction over Git and Darcs (and a half-finished Sqlite3), and basically follows the ikiwki model which is what people think of when they say things like 'I wish my wiki used a DVCS instead of a database' - each article is a file which is tracked by the repository, and the wiki is actually a web front end to the repo. You can 'git clone' it or whatever, but otherwise it acts like a regular wiki.
Performance-wise filestore has been interesting. It exposed a performance issue in Darcs which we (Darcs) fixed, and shown that calling binaries to do things on-disk for you isn't all that expensive - I believe on a regular system with a git backend, Gitit can do ~100 page views and edits a second. But it's not at all obvious how things could get much faster than that. So my conclusion is that for very large wikis, DVCS bases may never be competitive performance-wise; although small and medium wikis (particularly ones aimed at developers) probably can benefit from such an approach.
[cc'ed to mediawiki-l] [from wikien-l - discussion of git-backed MediaWiki]
2009/4/23 Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com:
As it happens, I've thought about this before and have a little expertise in the issue. I'm one of the developers of a wiki called Gitit - http://github.com/jgm/gitit/tree/master - written in Haskell. The most interesting thing about Gitit, besides its ability to export articles (written in Markdown or ReST) in various formats such as HTML or PDFs or LaTeX, is that it uses a library called 'filestore' - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/filestore - to access and change articles.
While the idea of putting lumps of PHP into an otherwise Haskell project is really quite horrifying, the parser that (literally) defines MediaWiki wikitext could to some degree be made into a module for use elsewhere. I understand it's not entirely cleanly separated out in the MediaWiki codebase, but if you could do that you'd at least have something that quite definitely processed MediaWiki wikitext precisely as MediaWiki does.
This might be better for mediawiki-l ...
- d.
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:40 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
[cc'ed to mediawiki-l] [from wikien-l - discussion of git-backed MediaWiki]
2009/4/23 Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com:
As it happens, I've thought about this before and have a little expertise in the issue. I'm one of the developers of a wiki called Gitit - http://github.com/jgm/gitit/tree/master - written in Haskell. The most interesting thing about Gitit, besides its ability to export articles (written in Markdown or ReST) in various formats such as HTML or PDFs or LaTeX, is that it uses a library called 'filestore' - http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/filestore - to access and change articles.
While the idea of putting lumps of PHP into an otherwise Haskell project is really quite horrifying, the parser that (literally) defines MediaWiki wikitext could to some degree be made into a module for use elsewhere. I understand it's not entirely cleanly separated out in the MediaWiki codebase, but if you could do that you'd at least have something that quite definitely processed MediaWiki wikitext precisely as MediaWiki does.
This might be better for mediawiki-l ...
- d.
The library/executable actually doing all the translating, Pandoc, has a relatively limited MediaWiki capability - it's just output, as I said, not input. It's much easier to take your intermediate representation language and turn it into a small subset of correct MediaWiki markup (omitting such things as templates, which don't exist in Markdown & ReST) than it is to parse the wild-and-wooly world of MediaWiki files (as many projects have discovered to their dismay).
2009/4/23 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/23 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/4/23 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I'll let you use p2pedia.org. :)
Suggestion: Distributed git-based backed for MediaWiki. Usefulness: encouraging forks *and merges*. Now *that* could kick Wikipedia's arse in useful and productive ways.
I recall this being discussed before somewhere (mediawiki-l?). It's an interesting idea, but I don't know enough about git to know if it could actually be made to work (it would need something better than our current edit conflict system, for a start).
The idea's been floated a lot, and I think someone was playing with it. But the notion of storing revs in a database - and rather a lot of very specific, not very portable MySQL-specific optimisation - is deeply rooted in the code. I suspect it would be rather a lot of work.
You could do something similar with database replication, but I believe Wikimedia tried this - keeping the Asian-language wiki databases on the Korean servers - and eventually decided it didn't give much advantage and so everything went back to live on the honking great servers in Florida.
- d.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I think competition is fantastic and fully encourage people to start competitors to Wikipedia, but in my view Citizendium has failed. It wasn't sufficiently better than Wikipedia to attract enough writers and readers to kick off exponential growth, which is required to reach a useful size.
Citizendium's not dead yet!
But it'll get good in direct proportion to how much it forms its own positive identity, rather than one based on comparing itself to Wikipedia.
I'd say Citizendium's best chance for success (if not the same kind of success Sanger and other Citizens have been envisioning) will be as part of the broader Wikipedia ecosystem.
After the license change, CZ content can be imported to Wikipedia. One possible evolution of the WP-CZ relationship will be a level of coordination, in which CZ writers are really writing with Wikipedia in mind, just in a little less of a free-for-all community environment. Already, there are probably several hundred Citizendium articles that are outright better than the Wikipedia counterparts, and many of them don't even have corresponding Wikipedia articles.
We've recognized for a long time that, while Wikipedia's advantages are strong enough to attract many knowledgeable experts, there are some who try it out and find the editing environment unbearable. Citizendium could become a project that is actively supported by the Wikipedia community, where we encourage some editors to go so that they can work in relative peace and eventually have the chance to re-integrate their work in Wikipedia.
For a while, it seemed that what ultimately tied together the CZ community was opposition (for a wide, sometimes incompatible range of reasons) to Wikipedia. But I don't think that's the case anymore, and just the fact that participation levels are remaining stable suggests that they've forged something of a self-sustaining community, even if the hoped-for critical mass never comes.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/4/21 Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com:
Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less
about its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important subjects.
So it's all about the writing? I would have though the important thing was the reading. Wikipedia is all about spreading free knowledge - if no-one reads what you write, there is no point writing it.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yes. This is a fallacy we see over and over: "Wikipedia would be so much better if you did X for the writers." Whereas that doesn't serve the readers, so is why we don't do it.
"If no one reads what you write, there is no point writing it." Is that something most Wikipedians would agree with? There really ought to be a Wikiversity course on this stuff. I think it's essential reading for anyone who wants to be a Wikipedian.
2009/4/22 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
"If no one reads what you write, there is no point writing it." Is that something most Wikipedians would agree with? There really ought to be a Wikiversity course on this stuff. I think it's essential reading for anyone who wants to be a Wikipedian.
Probably someone could take our various guideline and essay pages and make them into a course.
- d.
Well, then I hope they tighten up the identity checks but with respect to an individual's privacy, of course. This is what makes the environment interesting, that everyone's using real names.
As a reader I just don't like reading what the anonymites of the world have to say anymore. I'd like to know what serious people have to say about certain subjects. Who would edit the article about "cyberspace" and what would they write?
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Cyberspace
Whenever someone has something to say, and wants their name to be attached to it, they can go to Citizendium.
Chet
________________________________ From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 7:46:07 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia
2009/4/21 Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com:
Here's why Citizendium is far better:
- It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails.
The identities aren't generally verified, the only requirement is that you use a name which is plausibly a real one. It doesn't have to be your real name.
----
Many of these very constraints are exactly what are likely to stop Citizendium from reaching "critical mass". Whatever that phrase means Wikipedia has it and Citizendium does not. I think it's an interesting question whether Wikipedia would have been successful had these influences prevailed early on in its history (post-Nupedia).
Many people are easily discouraged by barries to participation. That doesn't mean that the information contained inside their brains ceases to be useful to the project, it just means you'll have to come up with ways to help them participate in a constructive manner. These two constraints seem to be at odds - how can we get people who have information that is useful to us, but are perhaps a bit fickle when it comes to technology, to contribute that information without hurting the encyclopedia? The answer is not to weed them out - that would be to avoid the challenge entirely. The trick is to use that very technology to lower the barrier to participation to a level low enough to get them hooked. On Wikipedia this means allowing them to go ahead and submit their ideas and allow several thousand more technically minded contributors - or other anons - to clean up and polish the contribution.
So far this technique has worked really, really well. Even fairly reasonable independent academic reviews show that Wikipedia's content is actually not that bad - definitely a good place to start. If we go by numbers of articles then its true that most of the encyclopedia is low quality. But if we look at the actual popularity of subjects we find that quality does indeed scale with public interest. This is not very surprising since we show an edit box to every member of the public. We expect that the articles that get looked at more get edited more as well and that quality might scale with number of edits. And this is true.
So we see how Wikipedia and Citizendium are different: Citizendium thinks that fewer high quality edits made by exactly the right people is better than many low quality edits made by anyone who wishes. In this regard its hard for me to see a distinction between the relationships between Nupedia/Wikipedia and Citizendium/Wikipedia. Both of these less successful projects have gone to some length to weed out contributors, whereas Wikipedia takes a *totally* different approach to acceptance - everyone except the GDs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PBAGDSWCBY
These are both projects to build an encyclopedia and despite the different approaches that Wikipedia and Citizendium take it seems reasonable to compare them on their successes and failures. So far Citizendium is not even close to Wikipedia's quality despite the hullaboo made by its community. In fact, it's not clear how it could possibly catch up given their choice of weeding out contributors.
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com wrote:
Here's why Citizendium is far better:
- It's more open... everyone's identities are known, there are no
sockpuppets, there is none of the absurd overhead that anonymity entails.
- It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last.
Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
*This seriousness attracts Academics. Citizendium's slow growth is actually an incentive to serious-minded writers. It means the place is clear of the nutters and fans that Wikipedia has.
*The place is in the hands of "writers" and not an army of "1600 administrators". Can you imagine writing for Wikipedia as an expert and knowing that your bosses are in high school, maybe university, and only occasionally over 35 years old?
*Because real identities are used, less rules and guideline creep exists. It's more about the material.
*All the computer guys are at Wikipedia because they like the technical aspects of Wikipedia where you have to master a lingo and comply with MOS (don't ask!). These guys see everything in terms of percents anyhow, and don't have the kind of discerning mind that understands concepts and themes & etc. With them out of the way, you get a healthier bunch of writers who show up at Citizendium.
*Citizendium's difficult entrance exam is not really all that difficult. It's a sure-fire way of keeping out those who are not prepared to edit an encyclopedia and frankly, I love that!
Citizendium can just hang on, and stick around, because it's far less about its success over Wikipedia than it is about an environment in which serious-minded people with the werewithal can write about important subjects.
Chet
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com wrote:
<snip>
- It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last. Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
Some people *like* those articles on obscure topics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_elephant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergina_Sun
And Citizendium's coverage is lacking in vital areas.
I tried to look up Macedonia, but no article.
One sentence article:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Mongolia
One paragraph article:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Greece
No articles on Chad, Bolivia, Malawi. I stopped looking.
I also couldn't find a list of countries needing articles.
OK, turns out I didn't look hard enough. It is there if you look:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Geography_Workgroup
Though not all the missing countries are listed there.
That kind of organisation is stuff that Wikipedia did (and does) well, and which needed those willing to make lists and do lots of heavy lifting, and writing of stubs, rather than writing really good articles. That is why you will always need more than just writers. You need a wide variety of people working on an online editable encyclopedia if it is going to really work and scale, which leads on to your other points, which I snipped. But others have addressed those.
To be fair, I don't know how long it took Wikipedia to have an article for every country in the world - that would be an interesting question for someone to answer at some point - a standard list of countries with the date on which their Wikipedia articles were created (and a study of how the articles have increased in size since creation):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states
If you look at the bottom of this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_t...
Even the smallest countries and territories have impressively-sized Wikipedia articles.
Carcharoth
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com
And Citizendium's coverage is lacking in vital areas.
I tried to look up Macedonia, but no article.
One sentence article:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Mongolia
One paragraph article:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Greece
No articles on Chad, Bolivia, Malawi. I stopped looking.
Oh boy. And Belgium is plain *wrong*. I applied for an author account just to be able to change the most egregious nonsense.
Michel
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
To be fair, I don't know how long it took Wikipedia to have an article for every country in the world - that would be an interesting question for someone to answer at some point - a standard list of countries with the date on which their Wikipedia articles were created (and a study of how the articles have increased in size since creation):
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/countries
A list generated from that page -- it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. The change in size is rather more difficult to study ;-)
Sam
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
To be fair, I don't know how long it took Wikipedia to have an article for every country in the world - that would be an interesting question for someone to answer at some point - a standard list of countries with the date on which their Wikipedia articles were created (and a study of how the articles have increased in size since creation):
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/countries
A list generated from that page -- it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. The change in size is rather more difficult to study ;-)
Thanks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%85land_Islands&oldid=72606...
Aland Islands is actually March 2003 - problem with redirects there.
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004. A bit slower than I'd thought, really. Though Denmark is earlier than the date on your list.
Not sure what is going on there.
Carcharoth
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
To be fair, I don't know how long it took Wikipedia to have an article for every country in the world - that would be an interesting question for someone to answer at some point - a standard list of countries with the date on which their Wikipedia articles were created (and a study of how the articles have increased in size since creation):
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/countries
A list generated from that page -- it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. The change in size is rather more difficult to study ;-)
Thanks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%85land_Islands&oldid=72606...
Aland Islands is actually March 2003 - problem with redirects there.
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004. A bit slower than I'd thought, really. Though Denmark is earlier than the date on your list.
Not sure what is going on there.
I went by the links on that page, and didn't check each one! I think the main problem is cut&paste moves or suchlike.
But yes, the overall picture is "most countries had articles by 2002", so within two years of the beginning.
Sam
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004.
Some of those outliers aren't universally recognised countries. Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc. Some are regions of other countries with varying levels of autonomy. Udmurtia, Mordovia, etc. The most recently created article which is about something I recognise as a widely recognised country (I have never committed the list of countries to memory, so I may have missed one!) is Kenya, created in February 2003.
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004.
Some of those outliers aren't universally recognised countries. Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc. Some are regions of other countries with varying levels of autonomy. Udmurtia, Mordovia, etc. The most recently created article which is about something I recognise as a widely recognised country (I have never committed the list of countries to memory, so I may have missed one!) is Kenya, created in February 2003.
And, looking at Kenya's early article history it is clear that the current article was a rewrite of a previously existing article, which I can't find any trace of.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004.
Some of those outliers aren't universally recognised countries. Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc. Some are regions of other countries with varying levels of autonomy. Udmurtia, Mordovia, etc. The most recently created article which is about something I recognise as a widely recognised country (I have never committed the list of countries to memory, so I may have missed one!) is Kenya, created in February 2003.
And, looking at Kenya's early article history it is clear that the current article was a rewrite of a previously existing article, which I can't find any trace of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kenya&oldid=700553
Look at the "main article" links there.
It seems the early articles were "history of" and "geography of":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Kenya&oldid=262268 (11 May 2001)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geography_of_Kenya&oldid=26226... (11 May 2001)
etc.
Carcharoth
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004.
Some of those outliers aren't universally recognised countries. Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc. Some are regions of other countries with varying levels of autonomy. Udmurtia, Mordovia, etc. The most recently created article which is about something I recognise as a widely recognised country (I have never committed the list of countries to memory, so I may have missed one!) is Kenya, created in February 2003.
And, looking at Kenya's early article history it is clear that the current article was a rewrite of a previously existing article, which I can't find any trace of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kenya&oldid=700553
Look at the "main article" links there.
It seems the early articles were "history of" and "geography of":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Kenya&oldid=262268 (11 May 2001)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geography_of_Kenya&oldid=26226... (11 May 2001)
etc.
Which look in turn like they are from the CIA World Fact Book, or something similar.
Carcharoth
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
Which look in turn like they are from the CIA World Fact Book, or something similar.
Basically we dumped most of the CIA World Factbook into Wikipedia early on. 'Cos it's basically a geographical encyclopedia that's good quality and public domain.
- d.
2009/4/22 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
Which look in turn like they are from the CIA World Fact Book, or something similar.
Basically we dumped most of the CIA World Factbook into Wikipedia early on. 'Cos it's basically a geographical encyclopedia that's good quality and public domain.
As an aside, you can still find bits of it around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_Seychelles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Bolivia#Statistics
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/4/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
So it looks like all that low-hanging fruit went by 2002, with the outliers by 2004.
Some of those outliers aren't universally recognised countries. Transnistria, South Ossetia, etc. Some are regions of other countries with varying levels of autonomy. Udmurtia, Mordovia, etc. The most recently created article which is about something I recognise as a widely recognised country (I have never committed the list of countries to memory, so I may have missed one!) is Kenya, created in February 2003.
And, looking at Kenya's early article history it is clear that the current article was a rewrite of a previously existing article, which I can't find any trace of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kenya&oldid=700553
Look at the "main article" links there.
It seems the early articles were "history of" and "geography of":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Kenya&oldid=262268 (11 May 2001)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geography_of_Kenya&oldid=26226... (11 May 2001)
It's clear from the notice at the top of the earliest revision that there was an article called "Kenya" as well. I expect it pre-dated the X of Kenya articles.
I don't see why the writing of an article on Plato has to conflict with the writing of one on say... Platomon (I'm sure it's only a matter of time before that's a real Pokemon). Nor do I agree that having an article on the former and not the later makes you a better reference work.
--Falcorian
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Chet Hoover chet.hoover@yahoo.com wrote:
Here's why Citizendium is far better:
- It's more serious... vital articles come first... Pokemon comes last.
Only in many years from now will we begin to see trivial articles surface: obscure films, unknown actors & etc.
Chet
2009/4/22 Falcorian alex.public.account+ENWikiMailingList@gmail.com:
I don't see why the writing of an article on Plato has to conflict with the writing of one on say... Platomon (I'm sure it's only a matter of time before that's a real Pokemon). Nor do I agree that having an article on the former and not the later makes you a better reference work.
Indeed. People speak of de:wp as more encyclopedia-like, better-written, etc. than en:wp, but I've asked a couple of German speakers about this and they tend to actually *use* en:wp as a reference ... because it seems that in practice, breadth counts more for usefulness than does looking like someone's ideal of an encyclopedia.
- d.
dgerard wrote:
Indeed. People speak of de:wp as more encyclopedia-like, better-written, etc. than en:wp, but I've asked a couple of German speakers about this and they tend to actually *use* en:wp as a reference ... because it seems that in practice, breadth counts more for usefulness than does looking like someone's ideal of an encyclopedia.
Indeed, indeed, indeed. And yet, en:wp has backslid quite a bit there, too.
A few years ago, in what I now think of as its heyday, Wikipedia was a useful one-stop-shopping place to look up *anything*. Today, it's still darn good, but you can only be sure of finding something if it's relatively mainstream. Deletionism (enabled, of course, by WP:RS) seems to have won out.